Women Poets: Part One

Sappho

Sappho was so highly regarded among Greek poets of her time that Plato dubbed her the tenth Muse. She wrote nine books of lyric poetry and influenced many later Greek poets, but only one of her poems and few fragments survive.

Among her other achievements, she created the verse form called Sapphics. She lived in Lesbos, an island in the Aegean, where her writings suggest she had a devoted following of female students. Her intensely erotic poems show she had passionate relationships with, or at least feelings for other women.

As a result, scholars have speculated that she led a virtual cult of young girls, and that sex among members was rampant. According to another legend, she jumped to her death from a cliff because of her unrequited love for a sailor. Wherever the truth lies, her name and that of her home have evolved into terms for female homosexuality.

Anne Bradstreet

The daughter of a prosperous English family, Anne Bradstreet lived from 1612 to 1672. She moved to New England in 1630. She dedicated herself into raising a family in Puritan Massachusetts, but she could not quell the urge to write poetry.

In 1650 her collected works was published in England as The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up In America, the first volume of poetry produced in the New World. The poems in this book reveal Bradstreet’s struggle to come to terms with Puritan restrictions on women involving duties and education, but her later works, Meditations Divine and Moral and Upon The Burning Of Our House, express a profound and tranquil piety. Her poetry has since been viewed critically, but Bradstreet’s stature as America’s first woman poet remains uncontested.

Anna Seward

Anna Seward lived from 1747 to 1809. Known as the “Swan of Lichfield,” this English poet wrote elegies, sonnets and a poetic novel, Louisa, written in 1782. She was a good friend of the famous Doctor Samuel Johnson, whose idiosyncratic literary style she imitated in a collection of letters published in 1811. Her familiarity with Johnson lent some of the color to James Boswell’s famous biography of the man, as Boswell mined her for details about her townsman’s life. Sir Walter Scott published Seward’s poetry along with a memoir of her life in Lady Of The Lake in 1810.

Charlotte Smith

Having lived from 1749 to 1806, she was the mother of ten children. Smith took up a literary career to support her family when her husband was sent to debtor’s prison. She became one of the most prolific English writers of her time, publishing more than twenty novels and poetry collections. Her work is most significant for its tremendous impact on Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.